You might say that she came to her faith, dragged kicking and screaming… a little like one C.S. Lewis was.
Lewis famously described himself as the most dejected reluctant convert in all England.
“You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Surprised By Joy, ch. 14, p. 266).”
Lewis was raised among religious people, and had the “form” of religion, without any personal commitment to the Christ that religion described. He entered the world of academia, and surrounded himself with other skeptics. But God found him, defeated the atheistic defenses he relied upon, and brought him to saving faith.
Similarly, Kirsten finished school, and entered a world dominated by skeptics. When she was asked about it, she answered, “I was not looking to be a Christian. The last thing in the world I wanted to be was a Christian.”
Her next two paragraphs I will quote verbatim (emphasis is mine):
“I started dating someone who went to Tim Keller’s church, Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City. Out of curiosity, I went with him. But I told him upfront that I would never become a Christian; that it’s never going to happen. After about six or seven months, I began to think that the weight of history is more on the side of what [I was hearing at this church] than not. Tim Keller had made such a strong case, that I began to think it’s not even smart to reject this. It just doesn’t seem like a good intellectual decision.
“Really, it was like God sort of invaded my life. It was very unwelcome. I didn’t like it. Obviously, I started having a lot of different experiences where I felt God was doing a lot of things in my life. It’s kind of hard to describe, but I did have this moment where the scales just fell off of my eyes, where I was saying, ‘this is just totally true, I don’t even have any doubt.’ …I don’t really feel like I had any courage when I became a Christian, I just gave in. I wasn’t courageous; I didn’t have any choice. I kept trying to not believe but I just couldn’t avoid [accepting Christ]. If I could have avoided it, I would have. There is nothing convenient about it in my life or in the world I live in. It’s not like living in the South where everybody is a Christian. I live in a world where nobody is a believer. But God pursued me.”
Please notice that in both instances, these were happy, fulfilled, rational people who had neither time nor inclination to take an interest in God. And yet, in both instances, try as they might to resist or object, they became overwhelmed by the compelling claims of Christianity.
You may only now be learning her story, but many of you already know her name. This Kirsten who came so reluctantly to faith in Christ is Kirsten Powers.
More here: gospellightminute.com
